Political atmosphere

In 1932, amid the Great Depression, Roosevelt had won a landslide victory over incumbent Herbert Hoover, ending 12 years of Republican rule. After assuming the office, he took quick and decisive action, pursuing the New Deal, a broad array of measures intended to achieve economic recovery, to provide relief to the millions of poor and unemployed, and to reform aspects of the economy that Roosevelt believed had caused the collapse. The measures, passed in his first hundred days in office, had produced a limited degree of recovery by the fall of 1934, and in that year’s midterm elections the Democrats built on their already substantial majorities. Although the New Deal had alienated conservatives, including many businessmen, most Americans supported Roosevelt’s programs.

Surmising that additional action was required, Roosevelt introduced a “Second New Deal” in 1935 that included the Social Security Act and the Works Progress Administration. In addition, the Democratic Congress also passed a major tax revision—labeled by its opponents as a “soak-the-rich” tax—that raised tax rates for persons with large incomes and for large corporations.

Despite Roosevelt’s widespread popularity, his policies had evoked stiff criticism, including from former supporters. Sen. Huey Long of Louisiana, an early supporter of the president, had become dissatisfied with Roosevelt’s policies. Long’s Share-the-Wealth program (“every man a king”) was tempting to a depression-shocked public. A private poll in the spring of 1935 indicated that if Long could unite the various nationwide radical movements, he might carry up to four million votes in the 1936 election, thus wielding a balance of power between the two major parties and representing a threat to Roosevelt’s reelection. Long, however, died in September 1935. Father Charles E. Coughlin was also an early supporter of Roosevelt who turned on the president. The “radio priest” began expressing reactionary views that were increasingly anti-New Deal and containing anti-Semitic (and anticommunist) rhetoric. Coughlin, however, was Canadian-born and thus ineligible for the presidency, but with a listenership in the tens of millions he could wield great sway.

The nominations and campaign

The Republicans were in disarray politically from their devastating loss in 1932. In 1936 they rallied at their national convention, held in Cleveland June 9–12, in favour of Landon, considered a moderate progressive, who won 984 of the 1,003 delegate votes. The delegates unanimously ratified Landon’s choice of running mate, Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News and a critic of the New Deal (in a surprise, Knox would go on to be appointed in 1940 by Roosevelt as secretary of the U.S. Navy). The Republican platform was as much anti-Roosevelt as it was pro-Republican. It began:

America is in peril. The welfare of American men and women and the future of our youth are at stake. We dedicate ourselves to the preservation of their political liberty, their individual opportunity and their character as free citizens, which today for the first time are threatened by Government itself.

For three long years the New Deal Administration has dishonored American traditions and flagrantly betrayed the pledges upon which the Democratic Party sought and received public support.

The powers of Congress have been usurped by the President.

The integrity and authority of the Supreme Court have been flouted.

The rights and liberties of American citizens have been violated.…

To a free people these actions are insufferable.

At the Democratic convention, held two weeks later in Philadelphia, the party nominated Roosevelt and his vice president, John Nance Garner, by acclamation. Accepting the nomination in person (as he had done in 1932), Roosevelt proclaimed that “this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” In facing the Great Depression, the president focused on the challenge before him in warlike terms:

In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.

I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.

I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.

The general election was not competitive, as Roosevelt had the firm support of farmers, labourers, and the poor. He faced the equally firm opposition of conservatives, but the epithets hurled at him from the right merely helped to unify his following. Landon could do little to stem the Roosevelt tide. Landon received fewer than 17 million votes to Roosevelt’s more than 27 million, and Roosevelt carried every state except Maine and Vermont.

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